Dark Places
by magistrate
Summary: A mission goes wrong. People get hurt. And O'Neill is trapped in a dark place, where the one way out is the one thing he could never consider.
1. Lost

**Title**: Dark Places  
**Rating**: "T" for some language and a littlebitta blood'n'angst.  
**Genre**: Dramangst, I guess.  
**Beta**: I'm lucky there was an alpha. (If anyone wants to volunteer...)  
**Continuity**: Sometime Season 7. References to _Meridian_, _Abyss,_ _The Changeling, Solitudes, _and_ The Light_ but not enough to be truly spoilery.  
**Summary**: O'Neill's in a dark place.  
**Disclaimer**: What I made up belongs to me, what others made up belongs to them or to whomever was given the rights. The opinions expressed herein are the properties of the characters and not of any DeLuise. This product is not to be taken orally and is not tax-deductable. Qustions, comments and kumquats can be left in replies or directed to magistrata(at)gmail(dot)com. Thank you for reading!

* * *

Jack woke in the dark. 

It wouldn't have been so unusual if it had only been dark. But this was a very specific darkness--a kind of gloomy just-barely-enough-light-to-see-by dark that denoted either a cave or a really, really bad Goa'uld dungeon. He wasn't sure which, in this case.

Truth be told, he wasn't sure of much in this case. Such as where he was or how he had gotten there.

He didn't groan, even though he wanted to. Instead, very carefully and very quietly, he moved a hand up over his face to check his skull. Nothing much hurt when he did--a few minor bruises, a few scrapes, but nothing worse than usual for a boxing session with Teal'c. Still, he felt out of it--confused, disoriented, with the feeling that if he tried to get up he would find himself light-headed as well.

He rolled his eyes to one side--then, seeing nothing immediately threatening, rolled his head to one side. As a grand finale he rolled onto his side, taking in as much as he could--not much. He didn't have his vest, couldn't feel his pack--he could feel his baseball cap still firmly on his head, could feel the regulation SGC jacket with its velcro patches. The Swiss Army knife in his right thigh pocket was a familiar pressure against his leg, though it seemed that and his watch were the only pieces of equipment left to him.

_(Odd. They got my lighter, my pen, and my fishooks, but they left my **knife**?)_

He had the feeling that he shouldn't have gotten out of bed that morning. The thing was, he didn't _remember_ getting out of bed that morning--or going to a briefing, or on a mission, or ending up here. Wherever here was. The jury was still out.

The room/cell/cave/place had one other occupant--a few moments of blinking and squinting brought him into fuzzy focus. Daniel. Sam and Teal'c were either not there or hidden in the shadows. He didn't see anyone else.

"Hey," Jack said softly. Didn't want to attact undue attention, after all. ...of course, it didn't seem to attract _due_ attention, either. "Hey!"

Nothing.

Jack groaned. He was going to have to get up, after all.

He pushed himself onto his hands and knees, then onto his knees. He didn't know how low the ceiling was, but the ground was uneven--he opted to make his way acoss the area on all fours rather than stand for the shaky few steps it would take.

Settling down next to Daniel, he put a hand on one jacketed shoulder and gave him a light shake. No response--though he could hear him breathing.

He could hear him breathing rather loudly. As if it was difficult--

"Dammit, Daniel, don't you dare--" he started, and reached out to check his friend's pulse.

Daniel was cold.

He jerked his hand away. It wasn't death-cold or hypothermia-cold, but Daniel was definitely not in the best of shape. His breathing was still ragged, and when Jack steeled himself enough to feel his pulse he found it slow and shallow, not quite as steady as it should have been.

Dammit. He _really_ needed to know what was going on here.

"Daniel," he said, shaking him again. "Hey! Daniel! Danny-boy! Wakey wakey. _Wake up_!"

The last, in a full military snarl, brought out... a slight stir. Not an actual waking.

Not a good sign.

Daniel was propped against a wall--dirt, if texture was any indication. Jack pulled himself up so that they sat shoulder-to-shoulder, starting a quick exam. His eyes weren't adjusting to the light. If anything, visibility was getting worse.

He didn't feel anything on Daniel's head--no swellings, cuts, foreign objects. His glasses had come off, though--never promising. His neck (still chill) was intact; there were no breaks in the fabric of his shirt or the bones beneath.

Except...

One arm had been pulled across his stomach and was clenched there, with Daniel leaned forward over it. _(Please be a stomach ache,)_ Jack thought.

"All right," he said, narrating as much for himself as for Daniel. "We're just going to have a look at you, okay..."

He wrapped his fingers around Daniel's fist, pulling his arm away.

_(...shit.)_

A fist-sized patch of Daniel's jacket was soaked in blood, and if there was enough to soak through to the outside of his jacket there had to be more on the inside and more still invisible against his black shirt.

He finished the examination quickly--no obvious wounds or breaks on his legs--and pushed himself away from the wall. The ground he was sitting on seemed to be a relatively flat patch, though he would have taken sticks and stones if it meant he could have _light_.

"You probably can't hear me," he said--and it was hard to hear himself over the blood rushing past his ears, "but I just want you to know I got pretty high marks in this class. So we're just gonna lie you down here..."

_("Position the casualty on his back with knees flexed. Turn head to one side for unconscious patient. Check for entry and exit wounds." Dammit, Daniel, I don't suppose you'd like to wake up and tell me what's going on here?)_

On impulse, he did an inventory of Daniel's pockets--and found nothing useful. Between them they had a knife, a paper clip, and a folded piece of paper. Not encouraging.

_(My kingdom for a penlight.)_

He pulled his knife from his pocket, swung the scissors out by touch, and trimmed back the shirt around the wound. If he couldn't see, he sure as hell wasn't going to try pulling it away--he didn't feel anything lodged in the injury, but he wasn't going to go poking to make sure.

He didn't have a field dressing, but he was reasonably certain that his jacket would be clean. Not sterile, but clean was better than nothing. He pulled it off, hacking down one sleeve lengthwise to expose the inner lining. This was a novel challenge: preparing and administering a dressing in the dark, with short-term amnesia.

They really should update the SGC curriculum to train for things like this.

He finished quickly--he really had gotten high marks on these exams--and wiped his hands off, trying not to think of the fact that his pants would be decorated with bloody handprints for a while. Daniel's blood.

He stood up, sweeping one foot across the floor and creeping forward until he found a wall. It was dirt--not that he expected anything classier. _(Someone sure sprang for the budget suite.)_

He hummed a low note, hearing it expand to fill the room. It couldn't possibly be more than three or four meters round, though even by standing on his toes and stretching he couldn't touch the ceiling. Carefully avoiding Daniel--stepping on him wouldn't help his condition--he found a wall and felt along it.

Worst-case scenario, they had been dropped here or the exit had caved in. Best case, he found an open door with a Stargate and a closet full of medical supplies and GDOs. He didn't hold out hope for the best case.

On his third circuit around the cavern he stopped opposite Daniel, hands stretched as far above him as they would go. A ledge--possibly a tunnel or a raised doorway--recessed from his fingertips. He had no way of knowing what it was or how far it went--but it was the only avenue open to him, and he'd be damned if he wasn't going to explore it.

"Daniel," he said. "I think there's a tunnel up here. I'm going to look for help. Won't be long--promise."

Careful not to lose his place, he crouched and jumped--caught the ledge and hauled himself up, flopping his weight down onto a stretch of flat, dry dirt. Yes, definitely a tunnel. Definitely a--

"...what?"

He turned, squinting. He could hear Daniel's breathing. He swore he had heard something else.

He swore he'd heard Daniel say _Ba'al_.

-

At first the tunnel was too low to do anything but crawl. Soon it opened up, and with the opening came light--but not much. In fact, O'Neill didn't notice until the tunnel ended in a long main run, the omnipresent black giving way to a muddy grey.

He stood, looking around. The cavern stretched to his left and right, extending only a few meters before him. To the right, pale light spilled down a sloping tunnel--enough to tint the air a sickly yellow. To the left yawned two cavern mouths, separated by a few feet of dirt wall.

He walked to the tunnel first, squinting upward. All he could tell was that it went up a ways--twists and turns kept him from seeing the light source or the distance. _(Plan B)_, he thought.

He turned back to the cave. Near his leg rested a low stone bench--or a rock shaped conveniently like one. The only feature of the wall he had crawled out of was the tunnel he had crawled out of.

_(Plan A is to scope this place out and see if Carter, Teal'c, and the gear is around here. Somewhere.)_

Searching the first cavern turned up a pedestal covered with Goa'uld text--either ornamental or broken. He messed with everything that looked like it might be a switch or a button, then everything that didn't, and nothing happened.

Searching the second turned up Carter.

He knew something was wrong as soon as he saw her--and it was more than the fact that she wasn't moving that tipped him off. She was pale--paler than he'd ever seen her, and he'd seen her ill, wounded, possessed and concussed. She looked like a perfect wax statue of his second in command, with perfect blond hair and a perfect drab jacket.

He didn't bother hailing her--she was obviously out. Instead, dreading what he would find, he crouched beside her and gave the same exam he'd given Daniel.

No injuries. She was comatose and non-responsive, but she wasn't _injured_.

He felt more than a little awkward going through Carter's pockets, but she wasn't in a state to protest. So, from a morbid point of view, it was a win-win situation--if she didn't wake up before he was finished, he'd be spared the embarrassment of explaining; if she _did_, well, she'd be awake.

In her right jacket pocket he found a handful of C batteries, which didn't make any sense as their flashlights used D batteries and the GDOs used AAs. In the rest of her pockets, he found lint.

_(Which will be great if I can find some straight sticks and need to start a fire, but doesn't really help me. Damn.)_

After checking--again--that Carter wasn't in immediate danger, he checked all of the walls. Nothing came to his attention. No panels, tunnels, plaques, emergency phones... all in all, the cavern was exactly like any other useless cave.

He stepped back into the main run and stubbed his toe on a rock.

The world was officially mocking him.

With a groan, he kicked the rock across the floor. What he wouldn't give for a lake, some stones to skip, a pro fishing rod, a can of--

_Twak!_

The rock smacked into something that didn't sound like dirt.

_(Huh.)_

He'd found.. bars. An upright grille, most of it buried under the dirt. He could feel air behind it, but couldn't see anything--no sound cam from it. Something smelled rank, though--if this was a dungeon, he wouldn't be surprised if a rotting corpse resided within. ...that was a pleasant thought.

"Anyone in there?" he called, wiggling his fingers through the bars. No answer. _(Of course not.)_

He stepped away and settled onto the stone bench, lowering his forehead into one hand. In the past hours someone had screwed everything phenomenally up--and he had the unpleasant feeling it had been him.


	2. Dreaming

_("Guilt," Daniel said. "If you want to control a populace you can do it through fear, love, or guilt. The Goa'uld aren't big on adoring worship, and for fear they'd have the Jaffa and their own technology, but they created this... machine... as some kind of instrument of 'divine justice,' if you will.")_

Jack woke up.

He shook off a thick mental fog--and then jumped, nearly crashing into a wall as he checked his watch. Midafternoon, Colorado time--not that it meant anything _here_, especially since he hadn't checked the first time.

Running through a mental list of every curse he knew, he felt around in the main run until he found the spur tunnel that lead to Daniel's cave and scrambled down it doubletime. With the totally inappropriate thought _(Score one for the Colonel)_ he judged accurately the distance, turning his crawl into a semigraceful drop just as the tunnel ended.

He slowed once he was on the floor, feeling his way across to Daniel. Time--he had to know how much time he had been out, how long Daniel had been alone in here.

His friend's condition, though, was unchanged. He was still chill, still breathing. A light touch to the dressing showed that the outer layer was dry--whether because the bleeding had stopped or hadn't yet soaked through was an open question.

Maybe he had been lucky and only lapsed for a few minutes. Still unforgivable--he couldn't believe he'd gone so far as to _sleep_ in a time like this. Even if he had been awfully tired.

"No excuses," he reprimanded himself. "Stay awake."

He rocked back on his heel, transferring his attention to the cave's sole other occupant.

"And if you want to _wake up_ at any point, that would be _totally_ okay, too."

Silence answered him, and his good humour crumbled. It was a good defense when there was someone else to hear it--he could raise his own spirits by raising those of his team, but standing in the darkness making jokes to himself brought only a feeling of abandonment.

Turning to the wall, he put a hand to the side of his head and dragged it up though his hair. He needed to know what had happened--what could have dumped them in separate rooms in a cave network, all variously injured--except for him.

Daniel had said "Ba'al." Or he had imagined Daniel saying "Ba'al"--he wasn't sure which. But if Daniel said it, maybe it was a clue; if he'd imagined it, maybe it was a _subconscious_ clue. Ba'al had something to do with it.

...though this was a far cry from his usual M.O.

He squelched that thought before it could develop further.

After checking Daniel--again--he deduced there was nothing to be done in the cavern and hauled himself into the tunnel again. By the time he had crawled into the main run he had enough dirt on his hands and knees to plant bulbs in. Once more, he took stock of his surroundings--the grille before him to the right, Carter's cave to his left, the dead pedestal to the far left, the narrow tunnel upward to the right. Nothing could be done from here, but maybe--

"Colonel O'Neill."

He caught his breath, didn't make a sound. "...Teal'c?"

"You must fight, O'Neill."

_Definitely_ Teal'c's voice. "Where are you?" His voice was close--the grille. Something else struck him. "Fight? Fight what? What's going on?"

No answer.

Jack practically dove for the grille, scrabbling at the dirt to either side and jamming enough of it under his fingernails to start a small farm. _(Screw the penlight. My kingdom for a trowel.)_

"Hey, Teal'c. Talk to me!"

Still no answer. But no sounds of fighting--gunfire, cries, impacts. _Fight_. What could he have possibly meant by "You must fight?"

He'd exposed almost a square meter of grille before he realized that digging around it wouldn't be easy. He was beginning to think that the bars extended far below the floor, that--

"_Whoa_god!"

His hand jerked back from the bars before he could think. There on the ground, half-buried in the dirt he'd been excavating, lay Junior--broken in half, tan organs scattered.

"Gahh," Jack breathed, forcing himself to press his face against the grille and look through. Junior's mandibles reached toward his neck--he tried not to think about them.

Teal'c sat against the far wall, a good meter and a half away. His shirt had been torn away--as had one flap of his larva pouch, exposing muscle and mucous and things Jack didn't want to see. He felt suddenly, intensely nauseous and turned away.

"..._damn_!"

He didn't want to think about what could have caused that. Hell, he didn't want to think about _that_. Or what would happen to Teal'c now that Junior was quite obviously (and disgustingly) dead.

...something about that struck him as wrong, above and beyond the obvious, but he couldn't put his finger on what.

In any case, he'd located the rest of his team, none of whom were in a position to help him. That was good and bad--at least he knew where they were.

_(But I still have no idea what I'm supposed to **do** about it! ...what **am** I supposed to do? Stay put and wait for a rescue?)_

He'd never been good at waiting for rescue--he'd rather be rescuing himself. Besides, what if a rescue wasn't coming? He had no idea what had happened--maybe they weren't where they were supposed to be. Maybe the mission had gone so wrong that Hammond thought they were already dead. Maybe they weren't supposed to be on this mission at all. He didn't know anything about the situation except for the fact that everyone was torn up _except him_. What could have caused that--

_(Hey, genius,)_ he thought darkly. _(Instead of trying to think your way out of this one with your world-class deductive skills, maybe you should stop moaning and **do** something?)_

The passage up toward the light was narrow--easily as narrow as the passage back to Daniel's cave, if not more so. And steep--god, it looked steep. It reminded him of Antarctica--

He wasn't going to think about Antarctica.

In fact, he wasn't going to _think_. He was going to _act_. As soon as he started thinking he could feel panic edging up on him--not something he enjoyed. Moving meant progress. Meant approaching a solution. He walked to the tunnel, put his hands on the sloping floor, and climbed.

After a few meters the floor broke into stairs, rough and uneven. He had to feel his way, squeezing though places almost too narrow to allow him, stair edges digging into his shins and palms and threatening to spill blood.

But the light above him grew steadily stronger, and the air didn't smell like cave any more...

He quickened. Ignoring the low ceiling and hard floors he launched himself upward, scrabbling toward the light. He could see the surface--tan dirt, heat rising in eddies from the broken ground.

The surface was... flat.

He hauled himself out of the tunnel and stood, stretching abused muscles. He'd thought that Replicator-controlled Halla looked flat--and it had. This planet was just as featureless but for a city far in the distance (a day's walk at least, if his eyes weren't playing tricks on him), the cavern entrance, and the Stargate.

He had to look twice to believe his eyes. The Gate stood within a short jog of the caves, something which Daniel no doubt had a good explanation for. He didn't. He never could understand why so many cultures put their Gate out in the middle of some vast open place miles away from anything.

Then he noticed that the gate had no DHD.

The usual kit send through to worlds with a DHD was missing, too. In fact, there wasn't even a MALP or a FRED. The ground was hard, which explained the lack of tracks--but for the region to be so utterly devoid of life defied explanation. For a wild moment he considered using the batteries and the paper clip to form a conductive circuit with the gate, then laughed. _(Sure. Coupl'a batteries, a Naqahdah reactor, they produce about the same amount of energy. Right?)_

He pulled one hand up to his forehead. What was the use, anyway? Even if it had a DHD--hell, if it had a tel'tak hangar and a duty-free--he still had no way to get his team _up_ here. The stairs were too long, too narrow and uneven. And while the city in the distance might be inhabited (he thought he saw smoke and patches of green), he couldn't leave his team in the caverns for the days it would take to make it there and back. Daniel and Teal'c would be dead by then, for sure--who knew what could happen to Carter.

His head hurt.

He collapsed, letting his head drop into his hands--for a moment. Just for a moment.

The ache began between his eyes, soaking into his skull and spreading. It felt like ice, hard and cold and dark--

-

_(This has **got** to be a dream.)_

He was wandering. Rather, his mind was wandering--at least in his dream, he was standing still, idly watching Daniel and Carter poking at a large machine. It was obviously Goa'uld make--a skull-sized red crystal in the centre of two standing gold rings obviously designed to rotate independently about it. It was set in a low depression on the ground, surrounded by consoles covered in hieroglyphics, still reaching to twice the height of a human and lording over the room in which it stood.

_(I should wake up now. My team is in trouble. This is a bad time to be dreaming.)_

The room itself was circular and maybe ten meters wide, with several doors opening into wide colonnades and a ramp leading up to a clear-shielded balcony which rimmed the second level. Daniel had gone on for a while about temples and architecture unlike other similar outposts, but he hadn't been listening.

_(Okay, O'Neill. You're going to wake up in five, four, three, two, one...)_

"Anything yet?" he called.

"We just got here, Jack," Daniel called back. "It's going to take a little more time than that."

_(Dammit.)_

The world fuzzed, and for a moment he saw the cave again--the light to his right, the dark caverns to his left and before him, the sun glinting off--glinting--

-

Six hours.

His watch light was failing. It was night in Colorado--wherever that was. Night shift at the SGC. Hammond and Janet would be home by now, or maybe they'd be staying late--holding out hope for him to lead his team home. Maybe.

He couldn't feel his hands any more. They'd gone over every inch of every wall he could reach, searching for anything--they'd been bruised and torn on a second trip to the surface, burned on the hot Naqahdah of the Stargate as he'd attempted a manual dial. It hadn't worked, and he hadn't expected it to. He'd nearly blinded himself when the sun dipped low on the horizon, lancing into his eyes as he'd tried to engage the first chevron.

He stopped himself from checking his watch again. If the light was failing the battery was, too--though he didn't know which would be worse, checking it until it ran out or not checking it and finding it had been dead all along. If he wanted the time he could climb to the surface, assuming the sun never set.

Down in the cave the silence drowned him. He walked from cavern to cavern checking on his team, an exercise becoming more futile by the repetition. It wasn't until he returned to the main run he found anything. Apparently one corner of the cave had collapsed while he was away, leaving a pile of loose dirt and--white plastic?

He dropped to his knees, sifting through it. He found mostly flecks--broken shards of plastic, torn and disfigured. But buried by the wall was a GDO.

The collapse (or something before it) had smashed the GDO's casing, exposing the electronics inside. It had no battery, and the C batteries were too large to fit--

_(...but I have the paper clip.)_

...something was very, _very_ wrong with this.

He retreated to the bench with no relief. Apprehension gripped him as he turned the GDO over, checking it over again and again. The electronics were damaged, the buttons had been pushed back into the casing, and he didn't know if he could fix it--those things should have concerned him, but they didn't. He'd searched this cavern until his mind went numb. The GDO _hadn't been here_ before.

He smacked the casing against his hand. It stung--it was real, or at least real enough to hurt. But it made no sense.

So much of this place didn't make sense.

_(No one has anything they should, but they have things they shouldn't. I can't find Teal'c until suddenly I think I hear him, and then I find him in a buried room I don't think there's a way to get into. For that matter, how did Daniel get into that little cave with me and a gut wound?--he's on the other side from the tunnel, so it's not like he fell._

_(Then there's **this** thing. Because I swear it wasn't here. Unless it fell from the ceiling.)_

Putting the GDO on the bench, he dug around the grille until he found the stone he'd kicked earlier. _(You'd think there would be more of these. It's a cave, for cryin' out loud.)_ Looking up, all he could see was a deep darkness. He threw the stone upward as had as he could.

_Thwup._

Dirt above him. As soon as he found where the stone had fallen he picked it up again, threw it again--and found more dirt. _(It's always too much to ask for a trap door, isn't it?)_

Ten minutes and three near-misses with the falling rock later, he gave up. He hadn't expected to find anything. _(Because it doesn't work like that. How it works is I get just enough to make me think there's a way out when really there isn't, because the GDO is useless without a DHD, but it's just enough distraction to make me forget how utterly **screwed** I am!)_

He flung the rock at the far wall with a snarl. It hit dirt. "All right!" he yelled. "The whole carrot-and-stick routine? It's getting _really old_!"

The silence hung around him as if asking whom he was addressing. After a moment thw question caught up with him.

"Someone planted this GDO," he said. "It didn't fall from the sky. It didn't just appear. Who put it here?"

The silence gave the definite impression it thought he was insane.

"Who's _in_ here? Tell me!"

...maybe he was.

He swallowed. "...Ba'al?"

Maybe he hadn't checked the cavern as thoroughly as he thought. Maybe that had been a dream, or this was a dream or hell _all_ of it was a dream inside a dream inside a dream he couldn't seem to wake up from, or maybe he was at that trigger-thin edge of madness where he didn't know which way was up or what was memory or illusion or reality. _That_ sounded like Ba'al.

_(So Ba'al got ahold of my team and is doing this to me... as some kind of revenge? Stuck me in a cave with no memory and no way out? God, I hate him.)_

He picked up the GDO and walked into Carter's cavern.

Whatever Ba'al had done to them--assuming it was Ba'al--he knew that Daniel and Teal'c were out of commission. But Carter wasn't _injured_--if he could wake her, she could help. _(Because Carter can figure out anything. Like how to work a Stargate with three C batteries and a broken GDO. I dunno, maybe she can figure out how to use the Stargate's... subspace... psychic... wave field thing to loop the current and induce a... cascade technobabble overload. A controlled one. With **magnets**.)_ He surprised himself by laughing. _(Yes. Exactly like that.)_

"Hey! Carter! Up an' at 'em! That's an order!"

She didn't move. He hadn't expected that to work. He knelt and shook her with similar results. Carefully, he pried one eye open--and, though her pupil contrasted enough with her grey iris to see it, there wasn't enough light to make it constrict. He was beginning to wish for the penlight again.

_(All right.)_ He chewed at the inside of his lip. _(Brain-wrack time. She's not responding to shaking or yelling, her pupils may or may not be working correctly, she's unconscious and breathing. Her eyes aren't moving, so I don't think she's asleep--or was it only part of the time you're asleep your eyes move? Argh.)_

Okay. Difference between coma and a stupor. He could do this one. _(If you're only in a stupor or asleep, you can... you can respond to stimuli! Like pain! If you're in a coma, you can't.)_

Of course. The old "injure your second in command to see if she's asleep" gig. He'd really prefer to avoid that.

_(Choiceless. Again.)_ "Carter, I'm going to apologize for this now, but it's something I really have to do," he said, just before he reached into one sleeve, found the soft skin on her inner forearm, and pinched down hard.

_(Unresponsive.)_

Had he hopes left to shatter, the word would have shattered them. He frightened himself by nodding it off--one more dire realization, one more unexplained tragedy meant nothing in this place.

He dragged a hand over his face, smudging the skin with dirt. The headache was coming back, or maybe it hadn't left.

_(...I'm not feeling so good myself,)_ he realized. _(Even for being stuck in a pit.)_

He leaned back into the dirt wall beside Carter, letting her weight settle against his shoulder. He could hear her breathing.

Letting out a sigh, he studied the back of one hand.

"You know, there was this one time in Iraq," he began. "Actually I shouldn't be telling you this, but it's not the classified stuff that's important, and who're you gonna tell anyway, eh? There was this time in Iraq..."

He trailed off. _(What am I doing?)_ This was unpleasantly like a confession--an admission of defeat. He wouldn't be saying this had she been awake, had he a way out.

"Things got ugly, It was me and my CO, off the books, undercover... no support. I don't know what happened. His watch. But all of a sudden we're pinned down, we return fire, we get out of it--but he takes a hit and we have to scrub the mission. This was... what? Third of these missions, maybe? Everyone kept saying we don't leave people behind, so I tried to carry him out. We were miles from anywhere, hostiles closing in, and he orders me to leave him."

Carter breathed at his shoulder--inhale, exhale. A gentle rhythm against the darkness.

"I argued it, he said he'd have me court-martialed, our position got made... and I left. And I never saw him again."

He couldn't bring himself to finish the thought. For a few minutes he let the near-silence envelope him, drifting with the weight on his arm and the sound of breathing.

_(As much as this might be pleasant, under different circumstances...)_

He glanced to his side, nudging Carter with an elbow. "You can't hear me, right? 'cause I'm just gonna keep talking."

She didn't answer.

"'cause it's funny. We go on missions, and half the time when I sleep in the field I have these crazy, bad dreams. Can't even remember them, mostly, but I wake up and I know they're there. But there was this last time that Ba'al got ahold of me--" He swallowed. "You don't think you're going to be able to sleep, something like that. But I swear I drifted off, just for a bit--I was hallucinating the hell out of everything. But I fell asleep. No dreams."

Inhale, exhale.

"I guess my point is, I'd rather you guys weren't along for the ride. I could handle all of this. Y'know, if you weren't here." He chuckled. "I guess that sounds pretty selfish when I say it out loud, huh?"

Exhale.

He let his head drop.

"We wouldn't know what hit us, sir."

He jerked his head back up--to see Carter as comatose as she had been. _(Auditory hallucinations, and becoming more pronounced,)_ he decided, fighting the knot that swelled in his throat. "I wish you weren't here."

_(I could handle all of this)_ he thought, and closed his eyes--trading one darkness for a deeper and more abject sort.


	3. Falling

**(Author's Note _(15th April, 2006)_:** Sorry this chapter took longer than the others. It's been a crazy week--between going to hear Noam Chomsky speak and then having my city sacked by tornadoes. I'm serious. Do a Google news search for "Iowa City tornadoes". Apparently it made the news in Canada, England and Australia.

ANYway, welcome to Chapter 3, in which O'Neill angsts, hallucinates a bit, and there is talk of monkeys. I hope you enjoy.

* * *

_"...it's called a cascade ribbon," Daniel said. "It's like the hand device, but about a jillion times more powerful. It rips your mind apart. It was used to punish people."_

Jack glanced over at his archaeologist. "Excuse me? Rips your mind apart?"

"Well... not _literally_," Daniel said. "Mentally, emotionally, cognitive-ly."

"Ookay," Jack said. "And we're really sure we want to be poking at it?"

"The Goa'uld in charge wouldn't just let anyone walk up and turn it on, Jack. I'm sure it's password-protected or something."

"You're _sure_."

"...pretty sure, yeah."

"And if we did?"

Daniel shrugged. "That would be bad."

"We probably wouldn't know what hit us, sir," Carter put in.

_(...what?)_

"That's reassuring?" he said.

Carter looked up from her instruments, tucking one under her arm to gesture at the rings. "The way it functions. It puts out an initialization wave that from what I can tell serves to incapacitate everyone it hits. After that comes a threshold distortion, which is just a byproduct of the major distortion--the actual point of the machine. That major distortion will--"

"Carter!"

She ground to a halt.

"I really don't need to know _how_ it works. Can we just focus on not turning it on?"

"...yes, sir," she said.

He shook his head. _(I have gotta be dreaming.)_

Because it had to be a dream, right?

The things he kept hearing. The way he kept slipping in and out. It had to be a dream--some kind of recurrent delusion, stress or fatigue or undiscovered injury. That or he was going mad, control peeling away like bandages and leaving him to come undone. Either was possible.

This place... was unlike the cavern or the surface. Above the core sat the balcony, shadowed in impartial shade. Outside he could catch glimpses of a huge ruined city between the pillars, the sun shining down on crumbling walls and rampant greenery. Off in the distance he could see the Stargate, framed by a wide swath of desert...

_(Wait a minute. Desert?)_

He came awake all at once, one hand making the journey to his skull at reflex. _(What the hell? Was that city--**that** city? All of this--does this have to do with that ribbon thing?)_

He juggled the questions in his mind--but dismissed them. _(No. The Stargate is still too far away from the city topside, and I don't imagine an overgrown hand device would be so specific. Gut wounds and caverns and dead snakes.)_

_(Damn.)_ It would have been such a nice, convenient answer--and it would have told him exactly where all his memories had gone. _(Should have known it wouldn't be that easy.)_

He shook his head, pulled himself up off the stone bench, checked his watch. **88:88**:88. _(Guess that's not working.)_

He stood, staring dumbly at the darkness.

After a while, he went back into the pedestal room, his mind connecting _pedestal_ with _control console_ with _DHD_, figuring that dumb luck favored him on occasion and maybe a thousand monkeys with typewriters or one Jack O'Neill with busted Goa'uld technology could open a wormhole back to Earth. Then again, the monkeys were always supposed to be writing _Hamlet_, and he was pretty sure everyone died at the end of that.

...he seemed to have wandered off the original point.

Cracks webbed the pedestal's casing, a few deep enough to wedge a knife into. Prying them away revealed a net of wires and crystals, utterly inscrutable in function. Two cords, each as thick as his wrist, lead from the net down into the ground.

Digging at them with fingers and the knife revealed broad clamps buried in the ground, connected to absolutely nothing. It took time--too much time--to dig out around them, and extracting the net from its casing took even longer--by the end he was tearing at the pedestal chips, ignoring sharp edges as they bit into his skin. By the time he extracted the crystals his hands were a net of scratches and abrasions. But he had a _something_.

The clamps looked magnetic. It was possible they'd attach to the Stargate, and if they did they might do something. Even if it wasn't their original purpose. Carter had made all sorts of machines do things they weren't supposed to.

_(Damn... Carter.)_ He hadn't checked in on anyone, this waking--then again, there was really no reason to. If their conditions worsened, it wasn't as if he'd be able to help. All his checkups did was take time--and now that he had a plan (though a poor one), he didn't want to waste it.

_(Plan C. Good ol' plan C. Climb to the surface, stick the clamps on the 'Gate, and fiddle with the crystals. Then power the GDO with the battery and the paper clip and dial Earth. What could **possibly** go wrong? I mean **aside** from everything.)_

Hauling the net--easily the size of his torso and at least fifty pounds--he made his way to the tunnel up and steeled himself. _This_ would not be pleasant.

Looping the thick wires around his shoulders, he climbed.

Five metres up his shoulders ached. At thirteen, they burned. At twenty they felt as if they'd been replaced by pain stick heads, and he wasn't yet halfway up. The net caught and bumped along behind him, dragging and sticking--he had to yank it upward, untangle it from uneven patches and ease it through narrow bits. By forty metres he had run out of profanity and desperately wanted to sleep for a year or more.

When he reached the surface the net stuck again, adding insult to injury--as soon as the light his his eyes he stopped moving, tied down like a dog on a very uncomfortable chain.

_(**Dammit**!)_

Allowing himself a moment of pure spite, he disengaged one shoulder and _tore_ the net upward in a spray of dirt--

--which shook the immediate area, collapsing the tunnel mouth and pouring down the passage.

_(Oh no oh no ohno**hellNO**--!)_

He yanked his leg out of the cave-in, scrambling up onto the surface. The tunnel groaned its protest, and the dirt came raining down.

Of course. It all made perfect sense. Because when whatever sick enemy had put them there ran out of ways to torment them, how _didn't_ it make sense that the dirt would turn against them, too?

New anger flashed through him, augmenting the slow-boil frustration already pent up. If dirt wanted to be his enemy, dammit, it would _be_ his enemy--there might not be anything he could do to Ba'al, but he _desperately_ wanted to do violence to _something_.

With the sun hanging low at his back, he dove into the tunnel and dug. All the anger, all the pain, all the frustration and hatred and fear--he threw it into the soil, attacked it until his shoulders locked up and his hands screamed bruised injury. And when at last he broke through, mad strength failing, the scree gave way into darkness--and he fell.

-

Jack woke.

He kept his eyes closed. He was comfortable--at least, ignoring the way every part of him throbbed, ignoring his cracking throat and stabbing hands, ignoring the steel-wool knots that had replaced his shoulder muscles, he was comfortable. Nestled in a soft mattress, sprawled out across a cool bed--

--of dirt.

The illusion of comfort disappeared, and he heard himself groaning. _(Dirt. Yeah, sure. Soft, loose dirt. I've been upgraded to the luxury suite of Hell.)_

The errant notion struck him as more amusing than it should have, and he caught himself grinning. _(What was I doing? ...oh, yeah. Plan C. 'C' for 'Cave in,' I guess. Fix the Stargate. And I think there was something about monkeys.)_

Of course, the Stargate was on the surface, and he was decidedly not.

Another groan wiped all amusement from his face. The thought of moving made him want to vomit. The thought of climbing made him want to die. _(Ba'al,)_ he thought again.

But, no--that didn't add up, either. What did? Even if it was Ba'al, even if he was complicit, it probably wasn't really _him_. It would be an underling, a slave, a lieutenant, whatever. This kind of torment... it was too _menial_. Ba'al savored his torment, enjoyed every moment of his victims' pain. And Jack hadn't found a hidden camera yet. And Ba'al would never wipe out three people in order to torment one--not when he could torture them all.

He pulled himself up without thinking of his injuries--and reeled, collapsing back into the surface tunnel. His team. Three people who didn't have the luxury of sleeping in and tending to aches and pains because they were going to die in here if he couldn't get them out. _(Nap time's over. There'll be plenty of time to rest when I'm home--or I'm dead.)_

Carefully, minding his light head and lingering fatigue, he pulled himself up against a wall. One more trip to the surface, he told himself. Then the Stargate would work and the GDO would work and he could crawl through the gate and Hammond would send him to the infirmary and give him a nice long vacation and send a S&R through to this planet and save Daniel and Carter and Teal'c and they'd all live happily ever after. ...the encouragement rang hollowly in his mind, but he hung onto it because there was nothing else _to_ hang on to.

He climbed.

Slow going. He stopped frequently, his muscles rebelling--he thought he passed out a few times, but couldn't prove it. Inch by inch he crawled up, loose dirt falling in trickles onto his head, his back, down the collar of his shirt.

Later--he swore it was years later--he made it to the surface. The sun sat low on the horizon, swollen and red--and nothing marred the even ground save the Stargate and the distant city.

The net was gone.

He didn't have the energy to scream. He barely had the energy to roll onto his back and look upward, and his mind gave up--it had no more plans, no more snide remarks, no more bitter rages at the unfairness of the world. The only thing that occurred to him was to rest--recuperate as much as he was able, though it could do no possible good. All he could think, disconnected to anything, was that the sky seemed the color of dress blues--deepening to the color of caverns.

He swore he could hear Ba'al laughing.

-

_"Ba'al," Daniel said from the console, and a shiver went down Jack's spine._

_"Ba'al?"_

_"Ba'ael is Ba'al."_

"Bail and Ball." Jack looked up at the ceiling. "This guy just thumbed through the 'B' section of the kiddie's picture dictionary, didn't he?"

"Actually," Daniel started, "both words are titles of respe--"

"Sh!"

He held up a hand, and his entire team looked at him. Silence surrounded them.

"Thought I heard something," he said.

"Do you believe we have been followed, Colonel O'Neill?" Teal'c's hand was ready on his staff weapon, his expression the minor variant of stoicism which denoted wary attentiveness.

"Who knows," O'Neill said, "but I'm not taking any chances." He shifted his grip on his P-90, starting up the ramp. "Stay here. Watch over the kids. I won't be gone long."

_(Won't be gone.)_

He could feel himself walking away, he could see the dirt cavern, and he didn't know which was which.

Teal'c raised an eyebrow and turned back to where Sam and Daniel stood.

Jack took the ramp up to the ring balcony, flipping on the P-90's light and scanning the dark hallway. He didn't hear anything, but--wait. _(There!)_

A low tapping, not patterned but not random. Typing. And where there was typing there would be a terminal and someone to use it--

He rounded a curve rifle ready, catching the intruder by surprise--just as he hit the final crystal and the machine screamed to life below them.

"Away!" Jack shouted, and the woman turned--and raised a hand device. Jack pulled the trigger without thinking, sending a spray of bullets tearing through her robe and throwing her back into the wall where her eyes glowed once before she crumpled to the ground.

"Uh, Jack--" Daniel yelled from the floor below.

Jack looked down to see the cascade ribbon's core spinning, the inner crystal glowing red like a small angry sun--and then it flashed, a concussive wave of force exploding in a ring outward, knocking down his team like dominos.

_(**Oh**holyshit!)_

Carter's technobabble came back to him in bursts--an incapacitating initial wave, a threshold distortion--and then the major distortion would spread out through the temple and cover the city, wreaking massive damage on any poor sap caught inside. He could see the threshold already--it hadn't progressed beyond the core, but it grew with alarming speed.

The Goa'uld was dead--not that she'd help if she wasn't. He sprinted to the control panel--

--no use. Typical Goa'uld design, none of the crystals had labels or identifiers he could read. He tried hitting a few at random, finally yanked them all out, but nothing stopped the buildup.

The first waves were already expanding toward the doors of the amp room when he ran down the ramp. By the time he reached the bottom the threshold had enveloped Daniel and Sam, and Teal'c's feet had disappeared into the shimmering air. He grabbed Daniel's collar--his arm went pins-and-needles where the distortion lapped over it--and hauled him out, but it wasn't going to be enough. _(I can't get all three of them back to the gate before that thing--)_

He had to destroy the core.

He had to destroy the core or his team would die in front of him.

He'd get an earful from Sam and Daniel, but at the moment he wasn't seeing any options. Of course, by now that entire area was under influence, and not just threshold--the major distortion field expanded so that the rotating rings were inside it and the rings themselves had sped up. _(I don't think a grenade is gonna make it.)_

Of course, it was remarkable what a P-90 at close range could do.

The threshold hit the wall of the chamber, enveloping him. _(Well, Jack, if you're gonna do it, now would be a good time,)_ he thought--and ran for the core.

Pins and needles were nothing compared to the frozen stab he felt as soon as he hit the major distortion--it struck across his rifle, clenched up his hands and sent spasms along his forearms, ramming the gun back into his chest. Hard to breathe. Hard to think. Hard to take one step forward, burying himself in the field that shivered like freezing water, jamming the riflepoint between the rings and pulling the trigger--

And the last thing he thought before everything ended was _(If we make it to that earful, I'll be the luckiest man alive.)_

-

_(...where am I?)_

His head hurt as he opened his eyes to... darkness. Familiar darkness. The kind of darkness that brooded around him, cool and still and absolute.

_(Where **am** I? What happened? What--)_

He came awake all at once, fueled by a jolt of panic. Oh, no. He'd fallen asleep again--who knew for how long, who knew if it was _too_ long, if--

He stumbled to his feet, hand flailing until it came into contact with a wall, and all he wanted to do was vomit. _(Dammit. I'm definitely not all right. I'm hallucinating and nauseous and sleeping too much, but I know I'm not concussed.)_

He would have liked to dream about Frasier. Daniel's dream lines had sounded like Daniel-speak; maybe Frasier could help him out of this--

_(What the hell am I thinking? Snap out of it, Jack--it isn't real. None of that is real. **This** is real.)_

"Colonel O'Neill."

His head shot up, every sense straining. Was that--had he just heard--

"Teal'c?"

The voice came down the long hallway, steady and indistinct. It couldn't be Teal'c. Teal'c was dying. His entire team was dying, and his head hurt--

He hauled himself up, nearly crashed to the floor. "T'. Buddy. Say something?"

The voice stopped.

He stumbled to the grille and collapsed into it, face hard against the bars. "T'!"

Behind the bars Teal'c sat dying.

He rolled away, back against the dirt. He felt cold--his head felt trapped in a vise, as if the world was closing down around him to crush him. He brought a hand to his forehead--sweat slicked the skin, cold under his fingertips.

_(This **can't** be real.)_

Absently, he wondered if he was going into shock.

That would be the crowning irony. He had to stop himself from laughing. _(For shock position the victim's on his back with his legs elevated by a small log, field pack, or other stable object. Loosen any binding clothing. Reassure the casualty. Be confident in your ability to help.)_

_(Who **the HELL** do I think I'm going to be able to fool?)_

He took a deep breath, clapped his hands over his ears. _(Assess the situation. C'mon, O'Neill. They're your responsibility. All you have to do is come up with some genius plan to get them home without a radio, working GDO, DHD, ship, weapon, stretcher, med kit, clue...)_

His next breath shuddered. _(Dammit. Dammit dammit **dammit**! Hold it together!)_

"This absolutely can _not_ be real," he heard himself say, and heard himself laugh. Laughter seemed horribly funny. _(Now I'm going hysterical! Funny how these things always happen when you really don't need them to. Me, hysterical! Whodathunkit?)_

So this was what it felt like to go mad.

He squeezed his eyes shut, clenched his teeth, and caught his breath and held it in. _(Keep it together. Gotta keep it together. Gotta think of a way out. C'mon, Jack, Carter would have us out of here in no time. Just figure out what she would do.)_

Nothing came to mind.

_(All right. What do I have? I have a Swiss Army knife and a watch. A note about something I don't understand. A paper clip. An injured archaeologist with all the trimmings. A comatose second in command with the same. Some C batteries. A Jaffa behind bars with a dead snake. Break it down futher--we've all got the clothes on our backs, in varying degrees of repair. That means cloth, buttons, zippers, bootlaces, rubber soles, leather, steel toes.)_

It was like one of those damnable brainteasers they passed around in Basic. He half expected the answer to be a pun. _Looked in the mirror to see what he saw, took the saw and cut the mirror in two, two halves made a whole so he crawled out the hole_...

_(This is ridiculous. I'd have to be effing MacGuyver.)_

The thought struck him as absurdly funny, and he began to laugh again. _(I do have the knife.)_

_(Dammit. Jack! Your team is in trouble. You're up and walking and no one else is going to save them for you. You **can not lose it** right now. You have to figure out some brilliant scheme using a paper clip and Daniel's notes to **save** the **day**! Then, possibly cake. And dancing. And parades in your honor down Pennsylvania Avenue.)_

He was laughing too hard to see, now. _(...damn, am I bad at this.)_ He should probably stop considering himself a great motivational speaker in times of need.

If Hammond was going to send help he'd have sent it. Maybe he didn't know where they were. Maybe other SG teams had been and gone. Maybe--maybe--maybe--

Speculation was useless. There were two facts. One: he had no idea how to get his team out on his own.

Two: there was no one in the world who could help him.


	4. Crashing

The SGC never slept.

Part of that was time differential--between worlds, night didn't always correspond to night. More than once the graveyard shift had seen teams come through the Stargate hot, with Jaffa on their tails and staff blasts screaming through the vortex behind them. 03:00 was most notorious, having seen Tok'ra activity, embattled recon teams, and on one infamous occasion a static burst that had scrambled the mainline computers and lead a groggy General Hammond to think they had another Entity on base.

The clock read 03:25 when Hammond stepped into the control room, looking as if he'd been up all night and trying not to. "Anything to report?" he demanded.

The gate tech shook her head. "SG-11 is still offworld, SG-5 gearing up for a SAR. Other than that all's quiet."

She didn't mention that nothing had changed since he'd walked in an hour and a half ago, and likely wouldn't change if he walked in an hour and a half later. She'd worked on base nearly two years now--she was attuned to its rhythm. Even though she hadn't been away from her station since midnight, she could imagine the stacks of paper on Hammond's desk migrating from "unfinished" to "finished" piles under a meticulous eye as the General tried not to haunt the infirmary wing.

"Keep me apprised," Hammond said, and walked out.

-

The base walked on eggshells.

It wasn't usually this bad--when SG-1 was missing, everyone believed they'd come home. They had to. SG-1, the flagship team, had a habit of getting into and out of more trouble than anyone else could claim. They'd _died_ more than once. They still came back.

Circumstances were... different, now.

When no more menial tasks existed to distract him, Hammond found himself at the Infirmary door, staring inward. A single bed dominated the scene, all activity flowing in eddies around it. The heart monitor cried a steady beat--a metronome, regulating the movement of nurses and doctor. The undeniable center of gravity was the figure upon the bed, barely breathing.

All the silence on the base seemed to emanate from this one man.

Hammond nodded to Fraiser when he caught her eye. She slipped away from the bedside and came to him.

"How's he doing?" the General asked.

"Not well," Fraiser said. "His dopamine levels are still dropping, and nothing we can do seems to stabilize them."

Hammond felt his hands fisting.

Fraiser looked up at him, what little energy she had left translating into sympathy. "I'll call you as soon as there's any change."

"Thank you," Hammond said.

Fraiser glanced back at her nurses. "General, how about Sam and Daniel?"

Hammond shook his head. "You know as well as I do," he said. "I could order them to rest, but I doubt it would do any good."

"Do you think they'll find anything?" she asked, voice small.

He looked at the Colonel's still form on the cot. "I don't know," he said, an unspoken _I hope so_ and _I doubt it_ warring in the undertones. "If anyone can..."

If.

"I have to get back," Frasier said.

"Go."

She nodded and slipped away.

Hammond stood a while longer, until the vigil felt too much like a death watch. He couldn't help feeling that would come later.

-

Earning a doctorate in astrophysics entailed a lot of long nights with like-minded graduate students and an intimate familiarity with coffee and headache medicine, and Carter was well used to identifying the symptoms of an all-nighter in others.

Daniel looked as if he had stayed up for the last week when he hauled himself into her lab, a stack of papers half an inch thick in one hand and a steaming thermos mug in the other.

Carter cast a critical eye over him. "You know," she said, "Fraiser told me to have you removed from the base if I thought you were overextending yourself."

Daniel blinked at her. "Told me the same thing about you."

Sam sighed. "When was the last time you slept, Daniel?"

He shrugged. "Snuck into my quarters a bit ago. Got a few hours."

"A few hours?"

"...ten minutes." He gestured with his mug. "You're not looking that hot, yourself."

Sam snorted. "Wouldn't be able to sleep, anyway."

"Got anything?"

The way her teeth clenched told him, long before she shook her head. "I'm no cognitive scientist," she said. "I have a basic understanding of the physics involved in the ribbon, but as for the actual effects on a person's mind..."

"Well, I have a bit of information on that--none of it particularly useful." He slapped down the papers. "A lot of the information around the chamber is the account of someone who went through it. Like we thought, it's a Goa'uld punishment device--the system lord ruling the world made some grand speech regarding the failure of the people to worship their god, broadcast the speech over some kind of Goa'uld PA system, and activated the device. It says, 'at once the city was overcome with a great wash of guilt and anguish... the minds of all were turned to the words Lord Ba'ael had spoken... and at the end of one full day those who had repented awoke to worship their lord and the sullen unbelievers had perished.' The emotional effect is designed with an achilles heel--it'll weaken if the original premise is reversed."

Carter looked up, turning a few shades paler. "One day? One Atascan day?"

Daniel nodded.

Carter shook her head. "The Colonel would never worship a Goa'uld--"

"I don't think he has to, in this case," Daniel said. "The Goa'uld use mind-alteration technology, but they can't go so far as to program specifics. I mean, the most complex system we've ever seen them use is the zatarc programming--"

She was too busy wrestling with the cascade ribbon to blanch at the mention of zatarcs. "Which is why Ba'al had to give the speech beforehand--the ribbon must work on the thoughts someone is having as the device hits them."

"That's my theory," Daniel said.

Silence crashed down between them.

"...I don't see how this helps us," Sam said.

"...neither do I," Daniel agreed.

Sam groaned, dropping her head into one hand to massage her temples. "One Atascan day."

"He may have destroyed it soon enough to weaken the pulse," Daniel said.

Sam looked up, straight into his eyes. "He was _right next_ to its _reactor core_."

Daniel went sheet white--not that he had much color to begin with. "How much time do we have left?" he asked.

_(Not long. Not enough.) _ "Two or three hours, maybe."

Daniel looked down.

"...I'll get back to work on the translation," he said. "Maybe there's something there..."

"Yeah," Sam said. "I'm going to run a few more simulations."

Daniel walked out, but paused just on the other side of the door. He turned back, unwilling to say what he had stopped to say. "Sam..."

She looked up. "Daniel."

There was nothing to admit. They both knew the odds--and that, no matter what they found, time was too short to act on it.

He tried to give her a small smile, but it emerged more funerary than encouraging. Then he left, heading to finish a translation which gave him no hope.

-

Jack felt himself falling but he wouldn't fall. He wouldn't hit the ground.

Once more he pulled himself up, dragged himself down the hallways into catacomb after catacomb. Daniel still lay on his back, still dying--and how long could a man _die_ without ever becoming _dead_? Teal'c deteriorated as he watched, sweat beading across his face, rolling down around the Apophis brand and dripping from his chin. Carter sat deathly silent, deathly still.

And in his mind, the embattled wall of his military discipline cracked and crumbled.

He went back to the tunnel over and over, staring up the the long slope. Maybe--_maybe_--if he could make a harness of bootlaces and jackets, he could get Carter up the broken stairs to the sunlight. Daniel couldn't be dragged that long with his injury even if he could get him out of his cavern, and he couldn't possibly move Teal'c that distance even if he got to him. And even if he could get them all topside, what good would it do?

The same questions came over and over to his mind. They never brought answers.

He stumbled into the main run and found the low bench, dropping onto it with enough force to jarr every bone above his hips. He put both hands flat on his knees and tried to concentrate, just for the moment, on breathing.

It was no use. There was no way out.

He could make it to the city. If he could make it to the city he could save himself. Maybe he could find help there. _(And maybe I could sprout wings and fly them out of here. It's not an option. Nothing is an option. There are no options.)_

Hallucinations hounded him. Sometimes he thought he could hear Hammond or Fraiser, so very far away. Sometimes he thought he heard echoes or footsteps or the clicks and hisses of the SGC. Once he thought he had heard Teal'c's voice, calmly informing him that Daniel and Carter were working in search of answers--as if they had the responsibility and the ability. As if he was the one who needed saving. He'd nearly laughed out loud.

He was tired.

The details became dark obsessions--the net, the GDO, the crumbled cavern wall. He walked in the caverns until he felt the gloom settle into his skin, until his own footfalls on the packed dirt mocked him. _It's over. It's over. It's over_.

For a horrible twisted moment he found himself hating everything--not just the cave and the Stargate and the mystery but Carter and Daniel and Teal'c and himself--them for breathing, for hanging on by the skin of their teeth because if they hadn't he'd be free of this. Free to give up, to surrender. To rest. He hated himself for thinking it.

He found himself laughing in the main run.

By then he didn't have any reason for it--couldn't find one if he tried. Nothing was funny. It wasn't hysterics. Something had been wired wrong, a neuron had misfired, he'd had one too many blows to the head and the crying cues got mapped to laughter--whatever. He laughed and the echoes laughed around him until he was too exhausted to laugh on.

He walked to the stone bench. _It's over. It's over._

He sat. He closed his eyes, and wouldn't let himself admit it.

_It's over._

As if the admission could make it true, he couldn't think the words.

From far off, echoing down the tunnels, he swore he could hear Dr. Fraiser's voice. _"He's crashing!"_

He couldn't help it. He pitched forward, palms against his eyes, and dissolved into laughter for the final time.

_(You got that right, doc. Got that right.)_

-

The phone rang.

Sam let it ring. She knew it was an illogical response--whether or not she answered it had no bearing on its message. She couldn't stave off anything by ignoring it. But the longer she did the longer she could clutch that last scrap of hope, convince herself that a chance still existed.

Even if she didn't believe it, she couldn't bear to see it proven wrong.

Guilt. She didn't need a cascade ribbon to feel it--it assaulted her from the text on her screen, from the hall to Daniel's lab, from the ringing phone. The fact that none of them could have known what would happen had no bearing. But the sick irony hurt more--because if ever anyone was to die of guilt, of course it would be Colonel Jack O'Neill.

The surprise was he hadn't _already_. All the guilt he carried with him--Charlie, Kawalsky, even Daniel in a way. And now this--a guilt he would carry to his grave, assuming it didn't carry him.

Life through the Stargate wasn't fair. She'd never thought that--she'd had it proven over and over until she could never seriously think it. But this went so far beyond unfairness as to make a mockery of it--this custom-tailored hell he'd been sent to, locked in with his darkest imaginings, too far away for them to reach.

"Sam."

She jumped.

Daniel stood in the doorway, and his face told the news better than words ever could. She swallowed. "We should get up there."

"Yeah."

Her fingers paused at the edge of the laptop for a moment before she closed it--as if the moment's hesitation could give her the stroke of genius she needed. Then she shut the cover, decisively--like the nail in the coffin.

"...let's go."

-

Janet knew the cause was lost--they all did. It hadn't stopped her from ordering a crash cart to stand by, or for staying by his bedside since they'd brought him in. _(It's funny,)_ Sam thought. _(She's ordered all of us to rest, and never thought of resting herself.)_

Her nurses moved around the bed in their intricate patterns, no effort spared--they'd fight this battle to the end, even when nothing they could do would win it.

Sam had avoided this level, this room. She'd poured every moment, every ounce of concentration, into studying the Ribbon--casting about for some way to undo what had been done. She hadn't looked at him--not since it had happened, since they had dragged him back through the Gate and turned him over to Janet's care.

Regardless of the Ribbon's effects, he didn't look tortured. He looked calm. At peace. _Comatose_, her mind filled in. The fathomless peace of the lost.

"He's crashing!" Janet said, and she didn't feel anything. It had sunk too far in to affect her now. She felt cold and grief as if he were already dead.

_(I wish I knew,)_ was the only thing she could think. _(I wish at least I knew what he was going through.)_

The legendary Samantha Carter had reached the end of her rope--no more miraculous plans, no more brilliant theorems. It felt horrible. It felt like dying.

She felt guilt.

Something she'd never seen the Goa'uld possess. _(So of course they'd make this. A weapon that only works against good people. God**damn**it!)_ She bit down hard, feeling pressure shoot from her teeth through her skull. _(All that guilt he can never let go--)_

_(...and we've been telling him to hold on.)_

It struck her.

_(It's **us**.)_

Without knowing what she was doing, Sam forced though the press of nurses. _(This breaks every protocol and standard of good sense but right at this moment I don't care. I am not going to stand here and watch him--)_

She shouldered her way past one of the nurses, leaning over the bed and gripping her CO's shoulders. "Colonel," she said, hoping her voice could reach him. "Let go."

"Major!" Hammond barked, shocked. Janet put a hand on her arm to draw her away--one which she shrugged off.

"Let go of us."

"...that's it," Daniel said. "The Goa'uld device magnifies negative emotions--we went down before he did."

Hammond looked to Fraiser. "I don't understand," she said.

Daniel wasn't listening to him any more. He had forced his way to the bedside too, voice rising against the thready heart monitor. "Jack," he said. "Listen to Sam. It isn't about us."

"You have to let go," Sam said. _(You have to let go or we'll lose you.)_

-

_"Colonel, let go."_

He inhaled--the process ached, as if his lungs were bruises. "Carter?"

Definitely Carter's voice. _"Let go of us."_

His head hurt. Everything hurt. "No can do, Major," he said, letting the weariness drag him down. _(Auditory hallucinations, father confessor.)_

Silence answered him.

"...that's not an option," he said. "You know that. No one gets left behind."

Now it was Daniel's voice. _"Jack, listen to Sam. It isn't about us."_

He staggered to his feet, looking back down the passage to the cave. "Of course it's about you! I'm _res_--"

_"You're not responsible, sir. Not this time."_

What?

"I'm always responsible," he said.

_(I'm always responsible. Because you and Daniel are geniuses and Teal'c's a veritable war machine and all I can do is keep us focused and haul your asses out of fires. That's why I'm here. That's what I'm good for.)_

_"You must listen to Major Carter and Daniel Jackson,"_ Teal'c's voice came. _"Do not concern yourself over the matter of our rescue."_

"I can't--I won't leave you behind," he said. "We all get out or none of us do."

_"Colonel."_ Carter's voice again--perilously close to a breaking point. _"Please."_

Please.

Something in the word reminded him of cold places and giving up. Surrender. An absolute need to see that someone made it out. _I'm dying. Follow my order._

Please.

He'd never guessed how hard it was.

_"...please."_

"I don't want to lose you, _any_ of you," he said without breath. _(I can't go up that tunnel alone. I can't leave you here to die in this dark place.)_

He was so tired. So tired.

"If it were me dying," he whispered to the silence, "would any of you leave?"

The answer stabbed into him, cold and absolute like the stopping of a heart.

_(No.)_

_(...but I'd want you to.)_

...he let go.

He tried not to think of what he was doing, but of course that was impossible. He couldn't help but see the pool of blood by Daniel's side, the paleness of Carter's skin, the sweat on Teal'c's face as he contracted illnesses his symbiote couldn't fight. Couldn't help but see the darkness of the catacombs as he started the long ascent toward light.

Light hurt. His eyes hurt. Everything hurt. The surface was hot and hard beneath his hands, searing in the sunlight. Maybe he'd never make it to the city. Maybe he'd just die here--

Vertigo hit and hit hard. He didn't know what he was seeing--didn't know if he was standing or lying, couldn't make out where the sky stopped and the ceiling began--

_(--ceiling?)_

The sun swung away.

Fraiser repositioned the light, unmasked relief in her eyes. "He's conscious," she said.

_(What?)_

He blinked, trying to press the world into some semblance of order. His throat was dryer than he remembered it. "Doc?" he croaked.

"You had us all worried," Fraiser said--though her voice belied her. _Worried_ was not the right word.

"How'd--find me?" he managed.

"Jack, you've been hallucinating," another voice put in.

If he'd been able to move, he'd have jumped. Instead he squinted, rolled his head over, and stared hard at the face by the bed. "..._Daniel_?"

Daniel was grinning fit to burst. "Yeah."

"You're alive!"

And--not only him, from the looks of it. Now that he could make out faces he could see Carter standing over him, Teal'c back with Hammond and a bevy of nurses with a crash cart. But they were alive. His team was alive. And--laughing.

But it was an odd sort of laughter, suggesting hurt as much as humor. "What?" he managed.

"We're fine, sir," Carter said as if it was an explanation.

Hammond cleared his throat and stepped to the rescue. "Yourself excepted, Jack, SG-1 recovered within an hour of their encounter with the cascade ribbon. You've been out for nearly two days."

Cascade ribbon. Hammond had to be kidding. That crazy hallucination?

Daniel must have read the incredulity on his face. "You really need to spend more time worrying about yourself. We weren't in any danger."

For an instant he felt tricked--but it disappeared in the wash of relief that followed, threatening to dunk him, drown him, roll him out to sea. He felt that too much more of this and he'd lose his composure altogether; he had a knot in his throat, and his heart wasn't where it was supposed to be. "...not from my perspective."

A shared wince passed between them--he was suddenly, intensely grateful that they knew him as well as they did. He didn't need to say anything more--to force the torment into words, say them out loud. They knew everything they needed to. They understood.

He swallowed, blinking back tears only half-caused by the operating light. "Water?"

Fraiser was already standing by with a glass--and one of those damned sponge-on-a-stick things. He groaned, begging with his eyes.

"_Straw_?"

"Sorry, Colonel. Just a precaution."

He eyed the sponge. He'd been through a lot of injuries--and he meant _a lot_--and somehow the worst of it was always the downtime, the clothing, and drinking out of those things. He tried one last-ditch attempt to spare himself. "Dignity?"

Fraiser smiled at him. "Doesn't mean a thing inside this room."

"Course not." He raised one hand, hoping it was steady enough that Fraiser wouldn't insist on feeding it to him herself. "Here."

Daniel coughed politely. "We should probably let you get some rest, then," he said.

Jack laughed--or croaked, at least. _(Good boy, Danny. Got the discreet exits down to a science, have we?)_ But--he really didn't want them to go. Not yet. Not when he'd spent the last two days watching them fade away. "What's the hurry?"

Carter hesitated. "You want us to stick around, sir?"

With a minimum of fuss, he stuck the sponge into the corner of his mouth and extracted every last drop of water. "Somewhere else to be?" he asked around the stick.

Sam glanced at Janet. Janet glanced at Hammond. Hammond tilted his head.

"No more than ten minutes," Fraiser said. "And then, Colonel, you need to get some rest."

"Been lying in bed for two days."

"Yes," Fraiser said. "But not _resting_."

_Ouch_. Point for the good Doctor.

"I was dreaming," he said.

Daniel looked away.

"Something about a cave. ...C batteries."

"You have never left the SGC," Teal'c said, six words to chase away the demons. To fight the battles for him.

"I heard you," he heard himself say.

He felt his eyes closing, and this time he didn't resist. With the Infirmary sounds rolling over him, he slipped into a deep and dreamless sleep.


	5. Found

"...and really, some of the writing in the temple is absolutely fascinating. SG-17 went back there and caught a lot of it on video. It seems as if their civilization evolved in relative isolation from the rest of the slave worlds..."

If hell had been the cave--the nightmare--heaven was sitting on Cheyenne Mountain's grassy face staring westward in hope of a sunset, or it was _damn close_.

Janet hadn't yet approved him leaving the base, but persuasive argument had convinced her to let him out of the infirmary--with an escort, of course. And after some more tricky negotiating and clever semantics work from Daniel, she'd agreed that carting some lawn chairs up onto the Mountain itself wouldn't technically be leaving the base, and not long after had found him sitting on the slopes with his team and a cooler of doctor-approved snacks. (She'd personally gone through to make sure he hadn't bribed Daniel into sneaking in anything illicit.) At the moment he, Carter and Teal'c were paying various levels of incomplete attention to Daniel as he went on about P3R-something something whatever, the planet where all this had begun.

No one had asked what he'd been through, and he hadn't told. Enough that he had the memories, that they'd joined the parade of images behind his eyelids.

_Carter comatose. Carter with a head wound. Carter with a staff blast boiling away the skin of one shoulder..._

He blinked at the sun, pushing the thoughts away. These at least were familiar demons. A new death had entered his thoughts and set up camp, but the slideshow was nothing new. And at the end of the day--the final accounting--Carter was still alive. As was Daniel. As was Teal'c.

As was he.

"Jack?"

He glanced over. "...yeah, sorry," he said. "You lost me back at 'absolutely fascinating.'"

In a very select set of circumstances, Daniel was more astute than he looked. "You all right?"

He could understand their concern--he'd felt it before. The nervous tics, sidelong glances to establish a team member was really there, the silent escort just to be around them, to catch them should they fall. But he felt good--better than he had in a long time.

They were all alive. So very, very _alive_.

"I'm _fine_, Daniel," he groused. "You're worse than Janet, except you don't try to poke me full of holes."

"Yes, _well_," Daniel started, and evidently couldn't figure out how to continue. He trailed off.

"Yes. Well." Jack fished another bottle from the cooler and focused a good-natured annoyance at Janet. "Non-alcoholic beer," he said, twisting off the cap and flicking it down toward the base entrance below. "The _paragon_ of pointless."

"The quintessence of the questionable?" Daniel offered.

Jack grinned, getting into the game. "The definition of daft," he said, and looked to Carter.

"The model of madness?" she guessed.

Jack nodded. "I'll allow it."

"The _beau ideal_ of bizarre," Daniel put in. "The nonpareil of nonsense."

"Leave some for Teal'c," Jack said.

An expectant silence followed. "I have no opinion on the subject," Teal'c said at length.

Jack nodded solemnly. "An omission of opinion."

Carter laughed, and hid it poorly behind her glass-bottle Coke. "Okay."

"We're done," Jack and Daniel said as one.

Suddenly Carter leaned forward. "There!"

Everyone looked.

The wispy clouds to the west glowed a smooth peach, the sky around them deepening toward navy.

_Skies the color of dress blues--_

"Isn't that something," he said, pushing the thoughts away again.

"Indeed," Teal'c said. "...on Chulak, sunsets such as these were regarded as holidays. Families would come together on hilltops to enjoy them."

"I can imagine," Carter said. The peach had spread, vivid plum undertones deepening beneath it. Honey-gold gilded the larger formations, brighter and realer than anything. "...from my analysis, I think that there's something in the makeup of Chulak's atmosphere that prohibits--"

"Carter!" Jack said.

She trailed off. "Sorry. It really is beautiful."

"And we are going to sit here, and we are going to bask in the beauty of nature, and until that sun goes down neither you nor Daniel will mention anything having to do with science of any sort. Is that clear?"

Carter smiled. "Yes, sir."

"Good." He leaned back, gesturing with his near-beer. "Because, for the duration of this display, we are going to consider it... _magic_."

Daniel gave an amused snort. "Or 'magnets'?"

"Same thing."

Around them, the crickets' evening chirps rose to a drone. Jack fought the urge to close his eyes. Against the rustle of the wind, he could hear his teammates breathing.

For a moment he struggled with what to say. There had been a time in Iraq--and he'd forgotten which of those godawful missions it had been, but the moment stayed with him. Somewhere between the blood and the bullets he'd looked up and seen the sunset--a huge, golden sunset in a huge open sky--and for half a second he'd _known_, just _known_, that he was gonna be all right.

"Magic," he muttered, low, under his breath.

There were battles left to fight--dangers to be faced, an uncertain future forged. The war was far from over. In another week all this could happen again, or something worse and unexpected--they could all still die on some godforsaken rock, waging a war that couldn't be won. But for the moment they were together, and the sun rolled low in painted clouds. And for the moment, that was enough.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Whoo. If you're reading this I suppose that means you've read through the entire fic. Thanks! I hope you enjoyed it. In that special way we have of enjoying the pain and suffering of others.

Feel you so inclined, I'd love it if you dropped a note to tell me what you liked, what you didn't like, what kept you reading, etc. etc. Feedback is how I improve--and also how I'm motivated to write and post more ;).

A few little tidbits: I had an interesting time with perspectives in this one, especially when it came to names. (Some of you may have noticed that in Jack's sceneds, Carter is referred to as "Carter", in Daniel's she's referred to as "Sam;" Jack is "Jack" to himself and Daniel but "The Colonel" or "O'Neill" to Hammond and Sam... fun, fun.

A bunch of little clues/discontinuities were supposed to serve as subtle hints in the cavern--for example, by Season 7 Teal'c was on Tretonin and Junior wouldn't have been around to get ripped in half. At the end of Ch.2 Jack falls asleep in Carter's cave and at the beginning of Ch.3 he wakes up in the main run, etc. Those were fun to do.

Next up is (I think) a braintic I've been toying with involving the Asgard, the Ancients, and a Goa'uld named Ammit. And copious Daniel, and possibly Zen koans. Assuming it gets written, I hope to see you there.

Thanks again!

--magi


End file.
